Reading Notes:

Video Links from Class

Gene Klein Holocause Survivor
She never moved because she was a mom
How I Lost Faith in the Megachurch
Abby Auclair, U.S. Army Nurse
Diane Carlson Evans
A Vietnam Nurse's Story at the Wall

Hilde L. Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, 1-35, 176-188.

Preface

xi: What makes our stories possible? Agency, and the possible range of agency is determined in part by our sense of identity.
Agency and identity are composed of many dimensions: material, cultural, imaginative, and the like.

xii: Two forms of harm with regard to one's sense of identity are: deprivation of opportunity, which can apply to all dimensions, as well as infiltrated consciousness.

xii: It may not always be obvious that the larger, dominant society deprives any person or particular group (based on gender, race, sexuality, religion, and the like) of their opportunities and infiltrates their consciousness. One way to resist or overcome these forms of harm to self-identity is through the creation of counterstories.

Counterstories can "resist the evil of diminished moral agency . . . by uprooting the harmful stories that constitute the subgroup members' identity from the perspective of an abusive, dominant group, . . . [and thereby] alter the dominant group's perception of the subgroup. [Furthermore], by uprooting the harmful identity-constituting stories that have shaped a person's own sense of who she is, counterstories aim to alter the person's self-perception.

Chapter I: Narrative Repair: Reclaiming Moral Agency

1: Nelson illustrates her ideas through the illustrative example of the nurses at Cranford Community Hospital.
1-3: Diversity of nurses' backgrounds.
3: "Technical" (predominantly male) doctors and "touchy feely" (all female) nurses.
3: Doctors seemed to see nurses as "Earth Mother with bedpan."
4: Military model of nursing as origin of these stereotypes?
4: To get the doctors to stop pigeonholing the nurses and denying them in this way, "the nurses would have to counter the destructive stories with better ones of their own."
4-5: Story of "dehydrated and disoriented elderly patient"
6: Counterstory stands against the Master Narrative as a story that "resists an oppressive identity and attempts to replace it with one that commands respect."
7: Formation of Counterstory: Identify oppressive elements of master narrative, and then retell the story to make relevant moral elements visible.
7: Alter dominant group's perception of a given subgroup; alter oppresssed person's perception of herself.
9. Found Communities and Communities of Choice
Found communities: families, nations, neighborhoods
Communities of choice: friendships, urban relatonships (trade unions, political action groups, support groups)
Example: For many, working at Cranford Hospital is a found community; Nurses steering committee is a community of choice.
11: What makes a Counterstory as 'story'? Depictive, selective, and interpretive sequence of events; also, connective:
13: Depictive of previously excluded elements; selective with regard to highlighting key inaugural, transitional, and/or terminating motifs; and interpretive in terms of a particular person/character's attitudes, values, actions. Also, connective, in the way they connect diverse narratives.
15: Counterstories are stories of self-definition, and they can be: nonmoral, weakly moral, or strongly moral. Of these, the most critical is the strongly moral counterstory, in which one finds "the ability of morally developed persons to install and observe precedents for themselves which are distinctive of them and binding upon them morally."
16-17: It refers to concrete histories and situations that must be affirmed or repudiated. Such counterstories are concrete, purposeful, and self-defining. They often revolve around defining moments that require courage and determination. The example Nelson gives is of refusing to remove contraceptive implants. These moments are moments of identity-formation.
18-19: Two kinds of counterstories, based on whether they are strongly moral or weakly moral: The nurses, self-consciously redefining themselves against the grain of the dominant hospital culture, are strongly moral. The novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is weakly moral, in that the effect is to set an upright example, with the possible influence on readers as being transformative by way of setting a moral example.

Narrative Repair
20-21: "The immediate purpose of a counterstory is to repair [damaged] identities." It is to revise stories that have deprived people unfairly or unjustly of opportunity. Examples Nelson gives are the redefinition of nurses' identities at Cranford Hospital, or the U.S. governments redress of Japanese Americans' internment during World War II. Of course, the nurses and the Japanese Americans can be said to have lost various opportunities: financial, professional or career, and social. But just as more important, to the extent that they internalized the narratives of damaged self-identity, they also lost self-respect and suffered the ensuing emotional damage. So, narrative repair also works to undo the pernicious effects of an infiltrated consciousness.

Identity and Agency
22: Identity is a function of how others understand oneself as well as how one understands oneself. Agency involves both the freedom to act/restrain oneself, as well as a constellation of social conditions: 1) the ability to understand and act upon moral norms, 2) ability of those around one to understand a given person as morally responsible, and 3) the ability of the agent to see herself as morally responsible. Think, for example, about cases of bullying and what happens both individually and socially.

27: Nelson gives the example of the nurse Pilar Sanchez, who is seen by the doctor as emotionally overindulgent towards her patient rather than morally responsible in conveying to them their own condition of terminal leukemia.

How I Identify Me: Infiltrated Consciousness
28: Nelson uses the example of the 1944 film Gaslight, in which the protagonist Paula Anton played by Ingrid Bergman begins to doubt her own sense of sanity when she suspects her husband of wrongdoing for no good [apparent] reason even though he has actually murdered her aunt and married her in order to steal the aunt's jewels. Yet, according to Nelson, Paul Benson, who uses the example of the Bergman character to illustrate a case of infiltrated consciousness, fails to distinguish between deception and oppression. In the case of deception, the only thing missing is transparency: Once the facts come to light, surely the Bergman character will be able to resist her husband. For Nelson, however, it is not just deception but oppression. In the case of oppression, not only must the facts come to light, the subject (Berman's character) must also come to trust her own judgment. The problem is not self-transparency but self-worth, or self-respect (think again of bullying).

Stories, Stories!
If we recall Brockelman's discussion of the need for faith in his concept of Time and Self, and think about the stories of the nurses at Cranford, we can see how religion, love, and death might be so integral to one another, as also may be the case in the film Gaslight, and the story of the Japanese Americans interned during World War II. Faith in one's own story may be seen as essential to one's sense of self-worth or self-respect, as going hand in hand with valuing and respecting others. Faith, self-love, and love-for-others then become inseparable, and their inseparability becomes especially apparent when there are issues of life and death involved.

But, what is it that makes the emergence of self-respect and self-love possible? Stories are key, according to Nelson, or more precisely, counterstories.

176: The Assessment of the Counterstory
When Counterstories Go Bad: Four Types of Stories Gone Bad: Boomerang, Hostage, "We are who I am," and Bathwater
177-8: Boomerang: Exception proves the rule. Passing as a member of the dominant group
179-181: Hostage: Takes hostage of alternate master narratives to dislodge a particular master narrative. Ex. An elderly woman who declines the "decline" narrative, continuing to be active, well-dressed, and so on, but at the expense of her daughter's well-being, since she now provides financial, logistical, emotional support in sacrifice to her mother.
181-182:"We are who I am": Overgeneralizing from a particular case: Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, as describing a specific socio-economic group of women.
182-183: Bathwater: Dislodges the oppressed as well as the oppressive master narrative: Ex. treatment of "disabled," as "disabled" rather than at least "otherly abled" or "differently abled." Consider cases such as Temple Grandin, animal scientist who is autistic.